Monday, January 3, 2011

Drew Barrymore Buys Big House in Montecito

CORRECTION (January 4, 2010): This is not, as it turns out, the house that Miss Barrymore bought in Montecito, CA. While we stand buy our impressions and opinions about the architecture and design of this house, it was not–we repeat–it was not purchased by Miss Barrymore. For information on the house she actually did buy, please see our correction here.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Listen, hunnies, we do not recommend any body actually do it but a person can not swing a damn cat in the wealthy seaside enclave of Montecito, CA without knocking a rich, famous or rich and famous person upside the head. High society types and other people of monetary means have flocked to the scenic coastal community since the late 1800s when they came in search of winter sun, salty sea air, mesmerizing vistas of the Pacific Ocean, and a near perfect Mediterranean climate.

An incomplete accounting of the lengthy list of current property owners with notable names in the fancy-pants Montecito area include Beanie Babies billionaire Ty Warner, actor/comedian/commentator Dennis Miller who recently put twenty million clams worth of Montecito area real estate on the market and actor Rob Lowe who recently had his newly built 20-room manse in Montecito photographed for Architectural Digest. Long time residents of Montecito include cinematic near-diety Kirk Douglas, actress and scion to a multi-billion dollar French fortune Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld, The New Adventures of Old Christine) and the singular and sensational gingy comedienne Carol Burnett while newer homeowners include former vice-president/global warming crusader Al Gore bought big digs in Montecito just prior to the announcement of his separation from wife Tipper in June of 2010. As far as Your Mama knows–and we don't know much of anything–the current and undisputed reigning Monarch of Montecito is media tycoon Oprah Winfrey. In 2002 the multi-billionaire spent more than forty million dollars to convince the owners of a 23,000 square foot mansion–that was not actually for sale–to part with their fully landscaped 40+ acre spread that La Winfrey now calls The Promised Land.

An informant we'll call Bea Aman kindly and generously provided Your Mama with listing information for Miss Barrymore's new crib in Montecito that reveals it was designed by renowned ladee architect Lutah Maria Riggs and built in 1937 for Baron and Baroness Maximilian vonRomberg. In 1938, shortly after the house was completed, the polo playing, car racing and plane flying daredevil heir to a Massachusetts banking fortune met his Evil Kenievil in the Sky when his airplane went down in the North Shrewsbury River near Red Bank, NJ.

The Baroness, née Emily Hall of Butte, MT, went on to marry American industrialist Burton Tremaine, Sr. and together they amassed a vast collection of 20th-century contemporary art. Miz Tremaine was an early and avid collector of Andy Warhol and the Tremaine's much hailed collection included significant works by blue chip artists like Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns. The couple, who lived in New York City and Connecticut, didn't just have a thing for art but also for architecture. In a addition to commissioning famed architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller and Philip Johnson to design a myriad of mostly un-built projects, in the mid1940s Mister and Missus Tremaine hired brilliant Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer to design an amorphous and ambitious but sadly unrealized beach house on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Montecito.

This was, of course, well after architect Lutah Maria Riggs designed a mansion in Montecito for the late Miz Tremaine, when was still the Baroness vonRomberg. The vonRomberg's Riggs designed residence sits on 3.5 acres in the heart of Montecito and property records show the multi-level and multi-winged mansion measures in at 11,026 square feet. Listing information indicates there are 6 bedrooms and 5 full and 3 half poopers. For what it's worth–and it ain't worth a thing–we count 2 primary bedrooms, 2 secondary staff/children's rooms, another two bedrooms behind the kitchen and garages perfect for the live-ins and a total of 6 full and 3 half poopers. Whatever the bedroom and pooper count, it seems like a lot of damn house for a single ladee.

A gated drive curves through lush, mature and somewhat disheveled landscape to a circular drive that wraps itself around a monumental oak tree and bends up to the imposing and somewhat forbidding front facade comprised mainly of forbidding solid masses and vast white planes. Wee glimpses of arched colonnades and the tippy-tops of a few palm trees that peep over a tall wall seductively hint at the eclectic and and somewhat eccentric interior spaces. A carved wood door, the only punctuation of the front facade, marks the entrance to the house. Or does it? The door actually opens into a shady loggia that leads to the actual front door and unfurls into a large courtyard with boxwood lined dining terrace.

The substantially scaled public rooms pinwheel off the entrance hall in a promiscuous but far from arbitrary manner. The capacious 750+ foot formal living room has hardwood floors laid on the diagonal, a bank of French doors to slide open to the rear terrace and a wood-burning fireplace, the first of five in the house. A banquet hall sized dining room has floor to ceiling windows, tight dentil moldings, and a perfectly framed view of a 40-foot long reflecting pool. The office/library offers a fireplace and a detailed wood beamed ceiling. French doors on one side of the room slide open to the entry loggia and on the opposite wall multi-paned glass panels slide back and open the room a second courtyard and swimming pool. A door to one side of the fireplace in the office/library opens into a secret built-in wet bar with an even more clandestine spiral staircase descends into a wine cellar and ascends to a tiny mezzanine level office space and on up into a walk-in closet in one of the two master suites on the second floor.

A room-sized passageway connects the entry hall to the living room and gives way to a second loggia that overlooks the swimming pool and leads to a perfectly private guest suite comprised of small entrance hall, private terliting and bathing facilities and a large bedroom that opens on two sides to terraced gardens surrounded by mature Oak and fragrant Eucalyptus trees.

There are, Your Mama suggests The Children note, two discreet powder poopers off the entrance hall. This means, of course, that male and female guests of a gala need not tinkle in the same terlit. A short hall leads back to the service and staff areas of the sprawling mansion where a butler's pantry larger than most people's kitchens holds all the linens, china and silverware. The fitted pantry connects the dining room to the kitchen where a short hallway extends to the dining courtyard at the front of the house and another stretches past the back stairs to the massive motor court on the side of the house. Six garage bays surround two sides of the motor court and a well-located half pooper in one of the garages is a savvy doo-hickey that keeps the landscaping personnel from traipsing through the house with dirty hand and muddy boots when they're seized with the urge to do their terlitbizness.

A attached apartment off the kitchen and behind the garages–comprised sitting/dining room, two generously proportioned bedrooms, shared split bath, laundry facilities, and a private walled courtyard–makes for unusually generous staff quarters that, sadly, most live-in household help can only fantasize about.

Above the kitchen and (staff) wing, on a mezzanine level midway between the first and second floors, two additional bedrooms and another shared split bath are suitable for either children or, for the really pampered, more live-in staff. The mezzanine also encompasses, a hallway that connects the wing to the main staircase, a bedroom-sized linen storage chamber and an even larger trunk room for storing all the various vacation valises, traveling cases and wig boxes that rich and famous types require when they go a visitin' abroad or, in the case of the very spoiled, across town.

Two masters suites located off the gigantic second floor hall landing each have a large bedroom with fireplace, over-sized private pooper and 20+ foot long dressing room. Both dressing rooms open to a shared sleeping porch for sweltering summer nights and both of the bedrooms have a staircase that leads to extremely private and even secret rooms.

A spiral staircase hidden in the back of a walk-in closet in one of the master bedrooms twists and turns down into the (aforementioned) secret wet bar in the office/libary and continues down to the wine cellar. It also leads up into a pair of small windowless rooms that Your Mama thinks would make for a terrific panic room and/or a place to hide jewels, cash and dead bodies. A winding staircase in the other master suite climbs into a tower where a sitting room with fireplace provides access to a large roof terrace. Floor plan information provided with the listing shows a bathroom on this level and the stairs continue up to a puzzling, unnecessary and whimsical tower mezzanine sitting/storage room.

Listing information suggests that the two master suites can be used in combination to form a particularly posh master suite with three sitting rooms plus a bedroom, three poopers, three fireplaces, a pair of dressing rooms, two terraces and one sleeping porch.

At first view the layout created by Miz Riggs–that would be the accomplished and smart ladee architect who designed the dwelling–feels eccentric, non-linear and disturbingly haphazard. A closer inspection reveals something far more rigorous, clever and, ultimately, architecturally persuasive with clear traffic patterns and conscious delineation of how the many rooms and wings work in harmony both together and separately. Not only is there ample space for a large family to occupy and fill every nook and cranny of the huge house but entire wings can be closed off and opened up as desired or needed by empty nesters. A snake like and still grand but very cozy crib perfect for a couple can be created by closing off everything but the second floor bedrooms, main staircase, entry hall, office/library, kitchen complex and hall that joins the kitchen with the rear entrance and motor court.

Your Mama can easily see why an effervescent, foot loose and fancy free woman like Miss Barrymore would find this particular mansion appealing. Like the house, Miss Barrymore can seem irregular and sometimes messy on the surface but a deeper and longer look reveals an astute, extremely successful, quirky but well organized businesswoman in full control of her sometimes be-boppy and air-brained public image. This house and Miss Barrymore are, in essence, two unconventional peas in a pod.

Since April of 2002 Miss Barrymore has lived primarily on a private promontory in the celebrity choked hills above Hollywood. Records show she shelled out $4,350,000 for a palm-tree dotted compound with a 7,756 square foot multi-winged ranch house with 4 bedrooms and 6 poopers. Her nearly neighbors in Los Angeles include Jason Schwartzman, Hayden Panettiere, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Holland Taylor, Adam Brody and Sheryl Crow.

Your Mama has always imagined that Miss Barrymore maintained a pied a terre in New York City but iffen we're being honest, and we always are, we'd admit that we have no specific knowledge of rumor or evidence that is the case. We just think it makes sense but we also think it makes better sense to make a cake from a box mix than scratch.

Happy New Year, Mama...and to all...Thanks for kicking off 2011 with a dandy bit of celebrity real estate news. You're so right that out-of-the-ordinary DB and out-of-the-ordinary-architecture-for- Montecito found each other. I'll bet that Drew really appreciates the girl-power that first gave vision and rise to the house.The house is too low down the hill for my preference in Montecito (it's quite a busy roads area all around the place); I'd prefer the Diandra Douglas house (if still for sale) at the top of the road - the house, the pool, the grounds, the VIEW, but it's many millions more. Most of all, DB will enjoy the village environment she can slip away to after being in fast-paced "Hollywood" areas most days.Be on the lookout at the San Ysidro Pharmacy for one more celeb getting coffee/breakfast/lunch at in the cafe area.Miss Lily Pond

When the nice gay decorator gets through with this place, it should be amazing. Too bad there aren't drop dead views from the main floors (that would definitely be the kicker), but I bet that little staircase leading to the viewing terrace at the top of the house is going to get a lot of use.

Curious to know what old blue blood family is unloading this. Estate sale, perhaps?

And yes, above commenter, the so good Julia's father is indeed a billionaire. He has a huge estate in Bedford that is famous for his collection of trees, a private arboretum.

Love L-O-V-E studying floor plans from this era to see how residents/guests circulated and staff discretely accessed different areas behind the scenes. So many ways for staff to get from point A to point B without being seen. Thanks!

Two major bedrooms upstairs and a guest room downstairs that you have to go outside to access, and 4 rooms for staff - maybe 2 men and 2 women? - makes for a very comfortable home life for a single girl. But even for chump change, I think the fabulous floor plan is negated by the busy roads and lack of view.

I am absolutely in love with this home. Who cares if it's close to busy roads and has no view, it has more architectural integrity than most houses anywhere. The floor plan is functional, grand, elegant, intimate and whimsical all at once. The architectural details throughout are classic, I'm sure soon to be historic if not already and very difficult to duplicate as are most homes from that era.

I consider this a great investment and if I had the money I'd buy it merely as a collectors item. Also, 11,000 SF of classic 1930s Santa Barbara/Montecito architecture for 6 and some million dollars seems like a bargain to me.

I too wonder who is selling this - the furnishings look like some old family is selling after owning for quite a while.

Love it. She needs to get the designer/architect that collaborates with Diana Keaton in, he'll make it amazing.

As for Julia Louis-Dreyfuss ... everyone is always surprised when they find out she's heir to billions of dollars. I guess that's the difference between the rich & the superrich ... the superrich don't need to shout about it.

I agree about this house having one of the best floorplans I have EVER seen! From the front courtyards, the Prohibition hidden bar to secret passageways & separate casita, it is AMAZING! Drew is one lucky firecracker, although she has made her own way throughout Hollywood and would have been dead if she hadn't had an Epiphany. I love the way the architect dealt with views & convenience. Each of the servant baths are divided so 2 people can use at the same time. It is rare to see a floorplan included with a listing on the West Coast. Maybe because it is historic? The price seems so reasonable, it makes me wonder when/if the electrical/plumbing/HVAC have been updated. (?) I wish her all the best. Thanks Mama for making my day!

I had the same feeling when I was looking over the floor plan - take off the garages, call the "Loggia 1" the elevator/stair tower, replace the courtyards and decks with terraces, and this place could absolutely be a Candela designed pre-war penthouse on Park or Fifth. Especially considering it's basically a two bedroom 11,000 SF home, which seem to be how those are laid out.

Hi again! I spent a lot of time in the Riggs house. I can tell you; your analysis of the floor plan is spot on!

Most people don't get it.....but, YOU sure did!I am a decorator in Montecito; and that house is a gem. The photos are off in color.....(ie stairs are not yellow...they are coral) but I am positive that a very fine decorator did the interiors when the last people bought it. Gloria and Robert Wirtz moved from a Candlela building on Park Avenue in the 80's.

(What perspicacious readers you have!!)The finishes are exquisite and irreplaceable. I hope whoever the new designer is; will recognize what is there.

Geena Davis bought a house here a few years ago. An Italian artist had spent two years doing the most magnificent subtle frescoes you can imagine. (working for John Saladino); Geena had the entire thing painted white......and never moved in. Now that is tragic.